The English Town, 1680-1840

Government, Society and Culture

Rosemary Sweet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317882947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An impressively thorough exploration of the changing functions, character and experience of English towns in a key age of transition which includes smaller communities as well as the larger industrialising towns. Among the issues examined are demography, social stratification, manners, religion, gender, dissent, amenities and entertainment, and the resilience of provincial culture in the face of the growing influence of London. At its heart is an authoritative study of urban politics: the structures of authority, the realities of civic administration, and the general movement for reform that climaxed in the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835.

Chapter One Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315840468-1

Anyone who makes even a cursory examination of the historiography of eighteenth-century England over the last twenty years will be forcibly struck by how much of it is urban-based. Urban studies have transformed our understanding of the workings of eighteenth-century politics and society and the relationship between the metropolis and the provinces. Paul Langford’s choice of title, A Polite and Commercial People (1989), for his volume covering the eighteenth century for the New Oxford History of England series, reflected the recent historiographical interest in urban society, and helped to ensure that issues surrounding the essentially urban polite and commercial society have remained to the fore in most subsequent scholarship. Some of the most fruitful recent research in eighteenth-century history, on the growth of the press and the public sphere, the rise of a consumer society, and the construction of class and gendered identities, has been carried out in a specifically urban context. The growth of urban society in the eighteenth century was demonstrably one of the most important elements in the dynamics of change which saw early modern England emerge from being a second-rate European power, essentially rural, under-industrialized, and with a system of ‘confessional’ politics, to being the leading world power with many recognisably modern attributes: an industrial, market-led economy; highly developed communications; and an increasingly secularised and liberal society. The study of towns and urban society, therefore, allows us access to many of the most important developments in eighteenth-century society. However, despite this fact, it is still relatively difficult to find any straightforward account of what it was like to live in a town, how towns functioned in terms of their government and administration, or how they slotted into the larger structure of the nation state. The aim of this book is to provide an outline of the main characteristics of government and society in the English town over the long eighteenth century.

The period 1680–1840 arguably saw the English town undergo greater changes than in any preceding period, all of which were essentially the result of similarly unprecedented urban growth. The contrast between our two terminal points is, in many senses, remarkable. In 1680 the structure of government was still essentially that which had been inherited from the medieval period. By 1840, however, the groundwork for the modern town council, elected by a democratic, rate-paying franchise had been laid. Meanwhile, the balance of the nation’s economy had shifted away from a primarily agricultural basis to a manufacturing one, and the proportion of the population living in towns had almost overtaken that of rural England. The country was well on the way to becoming a fully urbanized society, and the contrast between urban and rural society had deepened immeasurably. In the process, the structure of the urban system had been transformed. Town life was no longer synonymous with London; the metropolis lost the pre-eminence which it had enjoyed as economic and political arbiter at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, the ordering of the provincial towns underwent an extensive reshuffle. The old market towns of southern and eastern England fell down the ranks of the urban hierarchy and the balance of weight, in terms of population and political influence, had shifted towards the towns of the Midlands and the industrial north, which had become the engines of economic growth and the centres of extra-parliamentary activity.¹ Table 1, which lists the population by thousands in the largest English towns, from the late seventeenth century to the end of our period, illustrates the fluidity of the urban hierarchy. London dominates throughout, but towns like York or Colchester, which were pre-eminent at the start of our period, had sunk way down the rankings by 1841, while their place in the upper ranks was taken by urban upstarts such as Bradford or Bolton.

1 Donald Read, The English Provinces, c. 1760–1960. A Study in Influence (1964).

In the midst of flux and change, however, there were still continuities. A concentration on statistics and rankings masks the basic stability of the day-to-day experience of urban government and society. The first section of this book, chapters one and two, will establish how towns were governed – through what institutions and by which citizens. We will examine the record for efficiency and improvement and will consider the justification of some of the criticisms levied against them. Chapters three and four look more closely at the questions of politics and reform. Urban politics interacted very closely with parliamentary politics, given that the majority of the nation’s MPs were returned by the parliamentary boroughs.² Reform was agitated at both a national and local level and there was considerable overlap in aims, rhetoric and personnel. Consequently, urban radicalism has generally been considered primarily in the context of parliamentary reform but, as chapter four will show, it was also a movement directed towards the reform of local government and was deeply rooted in local contests over power within the urban community. On paper, the decade of the 1830s brought about extensive change to the parliamentary franchise and the structure of incorporated boroughs, but we will look at these changes from the ‘bottom up’, which gives a very different perspective on reform, substantially modifying caricatures of corrupt and inefficient urban government. The third section, chapters five and six, will look in greater detail at the social structure of towns and the emergence of a distinctively urban, class-based society. Social or class identities can only be experienced through social interaction, and we will be looking at the occasions and contexts in which they were forged. We will discuss how the experience of government, urban improvement and political activity, discussed in the earlier chapters, contributed to the process and we will extend our view to encompass a broader range of urban cultural and social activity. Finally, we will develop the idea of what it actually meant to contemporaries to live in a town; what it was that attracted them to the urban lifestyle and, alternatively, what appalled them. London provoked the most powerful reactions, both positive and negative, and the influence of metropolitan culture and fashions upon provincial towns has always been emphasised. However, we will be challenging these assumptions, arguing inst...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps and Tables
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Structures of Authority
• 3. Urban Administration
• 4. The Divided Society
• 5. Urban Government and the Movement for Reform
• 6. Social Structure and Social Experience
• 7. Urban Culture and the Urban Renaissance
• 8. Conclusion: Metropolitan Influence or Provincial Identity?
• Select Bibliography
• Maps
• Index